Giving Thanks For Going Without This Thanksgiving

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Vacations Are Meant For Relaxing. Why Are We So Stressed Going Back To Work After Long Vacations?

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Going from Obese to Bikini Body — Briana Case Study (Plus: New Tools, 4-Hour Body Group)

All tactics, no excuses.

This post will explain exactly how Briana, a mother of three and reader of this blog, lost 100 pounds. It’s a lot simpler than you might think.

For additional real-world examples and the fundamentals, I suggest reading “How to Lose 100 Pounds on The Slow-Carb Diet.” There are several men and women profiled.

Sidenote: Many of you have been asking for a free 4-Hour Body support group… so I created it here. It’s designed to improve success rates by 50%+.  In a recent four-week test, 86% of people who finished lost an average of 8.6 pounds.  Many lost more than 20 pounds.  If you’re serious about progress, take a look.

Now, onto our post, which was written by Briana herself. I’ve avoided any major edits to preserve her voice.

Please add any questions or tips of your own to the comment. Both Briana and I will jump in to help…

If you’re meeting me for the first time today, you’d never guess that a little over 1 year ago, I was 100 pounds heavier and the furthest thing from being proud in a bikini.

And if you’d met “the FAT me” a year ago, you probably never would have guessed that the over-weight mother of three was actually an accomplished personal trainer who’d lost 73 pounds years earlier… and gained it all back.

That is really where my introduction to the Slow-Carb Diet (SCD) began.

Five years ago, I was a stay-at-home mom.

I had a husband, two kids, a house in the suburbs with a white picket fence, and a great dane. I was a young mom in my early 20’s, trying to balance everything and be everything to everyone BUT neglecting myself. I made my family the priority, which was great for them, but I lost myself somewhere along the way. Despite numerous failed attempts to lose weight and get in shape, the scale just kept creeping up.

Fat, depressed, and frustrated, I ended up surfing the internet one day for some new nutrition and training inspiration, when I stumbled across Tim’s blog and the post he wrote on How to Lose 20 lbs of Fat in 30 Days… Without Doing Any Exercise. Four paragraphs in, I was HOOKED! I read it, I applied it day-in and day-out, and within 6 months I had not only lost the 73 POUNDS I had gained after having my first two kids, but I had completely transformed my body!

Needless to say, the experience was life-changing. After it, I felt compelled to pursue a career as a certified personal trainer and nutrition specialist. I wanted to empower, educate, and inspire other women to transform their bodies and regain a renewed sense of self — just as I had.

Shortly after I became certified, I went through a devastating divorce. As a newly single-mom, I set out to “4-Hour Workweek” my life, started my own multi-faceted health and wellness company, and spent the last 5 years helping to transform the bodies and lives of hundreds of women around the world in ways they never thought were possible.

Along the way, Tim wrote and released The 4-Hour Body, and my story was featured on national television and throughout numerous editorials, spreads, and fitness publications — the biggest of which was an appearance with Tim on the Dr. Oz show.

And then? I got pregnant with baby #3.

Long story short: despite being a personal trainer and all my previous hard work to be a “weight-loss success story,” I ended up being one of those Mego-Prego women who really went for it! By “went for it” I mean – if my weight gain had been an accurate barometer of my son’s birth weight, I should have given birth to a kindergartner!

From the moment I first found out that I was pregnant I decided to use the “eating for two” excuse. I indulged my cravings, and I packed on the pounds by way of ice-cream, Mexican food, lasagna, and a total break from the adapted SCD nutrition principles I worked so hard to establish in my own life and subsequently teach others.

Needless to say, I exploded over nine months, and by the time I actually gave birth to my 8 lb. 6 oz. bundle of joy, I found myself weighing the heaviest of my life–100 pounds heavier than normal.

So my baby is born… and I find myself asking, “Now what, fatty?”

Faced with the depressing reality that the new weight wasn’t “baby weight” and was really ALL ME, I made it my mission to swiftly re-apply the SCD principles to shed the post-partum pounds in record time.

It began with a commitment to change, and a real look in the mirror.

So many of us are miserable over the current condition of our bodies, we get motivated and inspired by reading stories such as mine, but that’s not enough. We need something lasting. Something that will motivate us to walk away from the bread basket, or in my case — back away from the sour cream twice-baked potato!

For me, that motivation came in the form of photos.

Before I began, I committed to document the entire process via a weekly pictorial where I would stand raw, real, and exposed in front of a camera wearing nothing but the same tiny black bikini. When I felt discouraged, or was having a internal struggle over something I shouldn’t eat, I would look at the photos of where indulging got me — FAT.

I took it one day and one meal at a time.

Beginning the day after I gave birth, I followed every slow-carb principle that is outlined — except for the cheat day.

The reason? I was breast-feeding, and through trial and error, it turned out that keeping my diet consistent by eating the same thing (more or less) everyday was much better for my baby (and my sanity), than trying to sooth a horrific colicky newborn 12-24 hours after binge eating on a “cheat day.”

The biggest SCD keys behind my latest post-pregnancy transformation were:

- Structuring every meal around a lean protein
- Meal frequency (eating every three hours)
- Totally avoiding refined, processed, starchy carbohydrates, and wheat (I came up with some wicked slow-carb recipe option substitutes)
- Eliminating dairy
- Completely cutting out fruit, which was my biggest craving during my pregnancy
- Drinking a gallon of water a day
- Upping my daily fish oil to 1 gram per 1% body fat — liquid form. Obviously, that’d otherwise be quite a few pills.

Just with the slow-carb diet ALONE and ZERO exercise (due to some postpartum recovery issues between week 1 and week 8), I lost 36 POUNDS.

(Click here for larger image)

And 12 months after giving birth, I hit my goal and lost 100 pounds (23 pounds of which were pre-pregnancy), and completely transformed my body.

Consistency is key. A typical day on the SCD might look like this:

Breakfast @ 7am
Egg white frittatas (made with veggies like mushrooms, bell pepper, and onion)

Snack @ 10
Veggies with hummus

Lunch @ 11:30
Usually dinner leftovers from the night before (i.e. Bison marinara sauce over zucchini spaghetti; Tuna stuffed avocados; etc.)

Snack @ 2
Small mixed green salad with chicken, cucumbers, green peppers, and tomatoes with a homemade lemon/garlic vinaigrette

Dinner @ 6
Tilapia fillet served over broiled garlic carrots, and coconut “rice” (cauliflower)

Biggest tip: If you fail to plan, you’re planning to fail

As a mom, life can be hectic, and it rarely goes according to plan.

I always prepare ahead of time for those moments with some quick-grab protein snacks. Turkey wrap “roll-ups” with a little hummus and a sliver of bell pepper or cucumber inside is my fave! Or little snack-sized baggies of almonds sprinkled with cinnamon. Hard-boiled “hummus deviled eggs” is another.

Prepare or fail, the choice is yours.

Putting on a bikini 7 days after you give birth is uncomfortable. Some might argue it’s insane.

Standing in front of the bright lights of a professional photographer week-after-week (often times without seeing much change), especially when you’re a personal trainer who is 100 pounds over weight, is humiliating, humbling, and painful.

But transforming my body, documenting the journey, inspiring other mothers, and ultimately founding BikiniBodyMommy.com has been the most empowering 12-month process I’ve ever undergone.

The journey isn’t always easy, but nothing worthwhile ever is.

My name is Briana. I am a 31-year old mother of three, I’ve lost more than 100 pounds on the Slow-Carb Diet, and I work every day to be a success story.

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Odds and Ends: New 4-Hour Body Support Group

I always wanted to guarantee that people could achieve rapid fat loss, and now I have the data to prove it.Today I’m launching a second, even bigger challenge on Lift. Think of it as one part training group and one part research experiment.First, join The 4-Hour Body group on Lift. Joining the group will sign you up for five habits from of The 4-Hour Body:- 30 grams of protein within 30 minutes of waking up- Measuring your weight, bodyfat %, and total inchesNext, just follow the habits and ‘check in’ each time you have completed one.Talk to other group members! When you set goals alongside other people, it keeps you accountable and leads to better results.  The 4-Hour Body community on Lift is there for this reason — use it!Finally, track your results.  Lift gives you numbers and graphs that show your progress.  Add pictures along the way (don’t forget to take the “before” picture) so that you can really see the changes.And as a final note, the last time I ran this challenge, Lift only had an iPhone version. But they just launched a web app that you can use from your computer or mobile phone.Have fun Posted on June 20th, 2013

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How to Keep Habits Going During Travel

Keeping up with habits can be difficult when you’re traveling, because all of your normal triggers are gone.

I’m in the middle of a long stretch of travel (2 trips, traveling 19 out of 23 days) and I’ve been doing a lot of experimenting with habits while traveling.

Let’s take two quick examples:

Exercise. Let’s say you normally go for a run or do a workout after you drink coffee, process email, brush your teeth, and eat breakfast … if you’re traveling and in a hotel room, you might wake up later than normal (after an exhausting flight or day of sightseeing) and go out for coffee and check your email in the coffee shop (for example). Now when will you run or work out? You usually do it after a certain sequence of events, with your breakfast being your main trigger for the habit. Without the trigger, the habit doesn’t happen automatically.Healthy eating. Let’s say you tend to eat a healthy breakfast of steel-cut oats, nuts & fruit at home, right after taking a shower … but when you travel, you don’t have the same meal in your hotel room after you shower, and maybe you’re in a hurry, so you grab something quick & easy (and less healthy). You’re walking around all day and grab a pizza for lunch (rather than the healthy lunch you normally pack for yourself). The change in your routine has changed your healthy eating habits.

Yikes. And this happens with every habit you have, if it’s tied to something in your routine at home or your office (and pretty much every habit is).

So what can you do?

Here are some things I’ve learned as I travel, from numerous mistakes:

Think ahead. It’s no good to say, “I’m going to stick to my exercise habit on this trip” and then hope you do. That’s like a New Year’s resolution — those guys never come true. Instead, figure out an actual trigger for your habit. Set up a reminder. Prepare your stuff the night before. Have an accountability buddy.Hold loosely to your expectations. Habits like exercise depend more than you might think on how much energy you have. If you are exhausted from walking and sightseeing, you might not be able to exercise like you do at home. This takes a flexible mind.Try to do the minimum. Keeping with your flexible mind: if you normally exercise for 30 minutes, try 5-10 if you’re pressed for time or low on energy. If you normally meditate for 20 minutes, try 2 or 5 minutes. It’s better to keep it going with the minimum, than to only do it if you have the time/energy for the full session.Know your keystone habits. If you have 5-7 habits you try to do every day, what are your most important ones you should try to do when traveling, and which ones can you put on hold? For me, I kept meditation, flossing and running, but let go of the rest.Pick it up when you finish traveling. If you don’t have the time or energy, just put the habits on hold, and take extra care to start as soon as you get back. You might even get some accountability buddies to help make sure you get started asap. The longer you put it on hold, the harder it will be to get started again. Also: when you start after your trip, start small.

I hope this helps! Happy travels, my friends.

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How to Avoid Burnout and Keep Going

This is a guest post by Andrew Dumont via andrewdumont.me.

It was my first startup. I was 18 and we had just raised our first realfinancing round – $250,000 from a local angel group. A lot was riding on us, even though the scale seems minuscule in hindsight.

We had just upgraded from a basement to an actual office, and we were on top of the world. Numbers were rising and the team was growing, it felt like we were invincible. We were pushing hard, but it didn’t feel that way. We were fueled by constant adrenaline from the latest press hit and the signing of a big new customer. We didn’t need a break, we felt great. Better than great.

After the highest highs, the good times started to fade. We began burning a lot of cash and couldn’t stay on the path we were headed. The days got longer and the adrenaline bumps were few and far between. A fresh Red Bull only got us so far. The only way out was to push even harder, so we did. We were all topping 80 hour weeks. It just wasn’t sustainable.

Eventually, I burnt out. Hard.

I remember coming home and curling up into a ball. I was so emotionally and physically exhausted, I couldn’t even move. My productivity was cut to nothing. The next day at the office, I found myself just staring into my computer, for hours. No movement, just staring.

I was shot.

It was a terrible feeling that took me months to shake out of. I guess I was a victim of my own immaturity. In the startup world, we push hard. It’s part of “the hustle” that we so commonly refer to. Thousands of people burn out each week, and I can assure you that number is very highly concentrated in the startup industry. So, how do we avoid it?

Each person has their own limit, and I was completely oblivious to mine. I love to work, so spending countless hours in an office wasn’t crazy, it was normal. But burnout crept up on me, so I had to find a way to avoid it from happening again.

After much trial and error, I did, and here’s how I did it.

I start out each day with a workout. It doesn’t have to be long, and it doesn’t matter what kind of workout it is. Some days I run, other days I lift weights. The method is irrelevant, but doing something active each morning clears my mind and provides a fresh dose of endorphins that puts me in the right physical state for the rest of the day.

Evenings were tough for me, I wasn’t sure how to turn it off. Hence, the “Always On” blog title. I would come home and hop on my computer, right after leaving the office. It wasn’t that I needed to, it was habit. I didn’t have closure to my day, so I simply extended it. To help with this, I started going for walks each evening before heading home after work. Not long, just enough to digest the day and clear my mind.

I was never a big fan of fiction. But there’s something about it that helps in avoiding burnout. Allowing your mind to think creatively and wander outside of your everyday routine can be extremely valuable. Each night before bed, I try to read a bit of fiction to remove myself from my traditional business mindset.

The past few weeks, I felt myself getting close to burnout again, so I instituted a rule for myself. One day a week, work is off limits – answering email, writing a blog post – anything. For one day a week, it’s off limits. I tend to rotate between Saturdays and Sundays, but it’s completely up to your schedule. To ensure that I stick to it, I tend to save errands and personal obligations for the weekend, forcing myself into a schedule without work.

I recently bought an espresso machine because I needed to nerd out on something other than work. Roasting coffee beans, playing with the granularity of the grind, steaming the milk, it’s all part of my new intellectual hobby. Whether it’s discovering the science of taking the perfect picture, mastering your golf-swing, or studying the art of roasting an espresso bean, we need intellectual hobbies outside of work to cleanse and stretch the mind.

So much of burnout is mental. In order to avoid physical burnout, you need to show your mind progression for all of the effort that you’re exerting. I’ve found that one way to do this is to set small and easily attainable goals that you can reach each day. This can be parsing down larger goals into smaller chunks or just going though the motion of checking-off completed operational tasks. Anything to show your mind progression towards a finish line can do wonders.

We all know that we’re supposed to eat well, but it’s especially true when you’re pushing yourself hard. Eating the right food can help extend your runway and give you the needed nutritional energy to stay strong.

After reading this article in Vanity Fair on Obama, there was one piece that stuck out to me. As the author interviewed the president, he said “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits. I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” Making too many decisions about mundane details is a waste of a limited resource: your mental energy. Operationalizing decisions in your life that are less impactful (like the clothes you wear and the fruit you pair with your cereal) allows you to invest that energy elsewhere.

Finally, a yearly unplug is a must. Especially when you work in technology. Having a set time each year where you can turn off the cell phone and go off the grid is a way for you to hit the ‘reset’ button on your body. I’m still working on extending my yearly unplug to more than four days, but even with that, I feel refreshed when I return.

You’re going to have to read your body to sense when you get close to burnout. Just like driving a car, using these maintenance techniques can help, but it’s up to you to know when to ease off the gas.

My immaturity got the best of me, but I’m hoping this will help you avoid the same fate. I used to feel guilty for pacing myself. I felt that if I wasn’t sprinting all day every day, I was doing myself and my team a disservice. Hitting rock bottom burnout was the only way to make me believe otherwise. Hustle is good, but it can’t be blind.

It’s taken me years to realize that overnight success is fictional. Overnight success comes after years of hard, sustainable work.

Here are 11 ways you can start safeguarding your life against burnout: 11 Simple Ways To Avoid Burnout

Featured photo credit: Business people with stress and worries in office via Shutterstock

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How to Keep a Conversation Going & Never Run Out of Things to Say

One of the BIGGEST problems you may face when trying to meet new friends is the awkward silence. Encountering this situation is so uncomfortable that it can even force you to avoid meeting new people in the first place, but there is a way to get around it. In the past, I I struggled with this so much that I thought it could never be solved. I even thought it had to do with my DNA or something… but I proved myself wrong when I learned how to solve it. Not knowing how to keep a conversation going can really harm your social life, but if you know how to keep those words flowing, you can meet, talk to, and get to know pretty much anyone you like—creating great possibilities for friendship, fun, and shared activities that you would otherwise have missed out on.

After studying this in depth, I found patterns of behavior that can keep you from making great conversation with people. One of these common behaviors is the habit of filtering—holding back from saying something until you’ve “checked” with yourself to make sure that what you’re about to say is cool, impressive, smart, and interesting. What does that do to your conversation ability? It kills it! Another problem is not learning to get in the mood for conversation. If you spent a whole day working or studying analytical or logical subjects, and you don’t know how to switch from that, then it can take a lot of time to warm up and start interacting with people socially. You can overcome this simply by learning a few new skills, such as the ones listed below. Once you do that, you’ll be able to talk to new people, and make friends, much more easily.

Let’s get you started with a couple of basic,  yet solid techniques on how to be a great conversationalist:

This is the reflex that allows you to say whatever goes on in your mind. No filtering, no checking with yourself  ”would I sound cool if I say this?”. None of that. The best way to practice this is to start doing it with people you kind of know—do you dare to try it? It’s fun to realize that you’re allowed to say whatever is on your mind, and no-one is going to judge you for it. As long as you don’t say anything that could land you in jail, you’re okay! People don’t care too much about how “awesome” what you’re saying is, because they’re too focused on how THEY are coming across. Get it? If so, let’s move on…

This works 99% of the time. It’s a surefire technique, and it works especially well for beginners. People love to know that you’re interested in what they have to say, so if you show some interest, they’ll hang around and want to talk to you even more. All of the “oh! that’s interesting…”, “Hmm, I’ve never heard of that”, “Hmm, cool!”expressions are reactionary bits of conversation that prove to the other person that you’re really listening, and that’s very flattering to them.

Everyone knows that stories juice-up conversations, but most people only talk about stories their own lives. You don’t have to draw from your own experience when speaking with someone: you can use stories from anywhere, from stories that happened to people you know, to those you came across via the radio,TV, magazines, etc. How can you integrate the stories into your conversation? The key is to first realize that you can use them. You’ve already heard them, and the more interesting or weird they are, the harder they are to forget, so you’re all good. Your brain doesn’t lose them. When someone mentions something related to any of them, just tell the story, even if it’s not from your life. It can be any silly story, short or long, interesting, or totally awkward—just use it! People love talking to people who can just share stuff openly like that. These techniques should get you started, but if you want to take it to an advanced level—to the point where you can just have fun when talking to anyone, meet the right people you want in your life, and be able to make friends with them fast—then I recommend that you take a little time to learn more about how conversations work. If you do that, you’ll make conversations far more interesting, with natural ease, avoiding all awkward silences that might prevent you from meeting the right friends that you would love to have around.

[Update: If you're looking for tips on how to start a conversation try the FORM technique]

Featured photo credit:  Two wonderful girls talk and look at the stripped scarf sitting at the desk at the library via Shutterstock

Paul Sanders teaches you how to: Overcome Shyness and Loneliness ; Master Conversation and Critical Social Skills ; Make Friends and Build a Social Circle. You can visit Paul, here: Get The Friends You Want

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The Delights of Delegation: Why Going it Alone Doesn’t Work

Photo credit: Stephen Wilson (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Whether you’re a high-flying manager tasked with leading your team into battle in the latest big company mission, or looking to get a passion project off the ground, falling into that most counterproductive of traps and trying to do everything yourself can be all too easy.

After all, these projects are your babies; their success — or failure — ultimately lies with you. People, be it your employers, colleagues, friends or family are counting on you to take this on and emerge triumphant.

When the pressure is on like this, most of us have fallen victim at one time or another to the belief that doing everything ourselves is the best option.

Yet by enlisting the help of others and putting your absolute faith in them, you’ll achieve much more than you ever could on your own.

The Oxford English Dictionary, describes the process of micromanagement as

“control[ing] every part , however small, of (an enterprise or activity):”

And there are certainly arguments for this oft-maligned style of management.

It could be that we trust ourselves not to screw up more than we trust our team or that we selfishly hope most of the praise and rewards will come our way once a project is successful. We might not even be consciously aware that we are micromanaging; we’re simply so stressed out about a big project that it consumes our every waking thought and manifests in a need to control every little detail.

Though the process of micromanaging others is problematic, even worse is instead going solo and undertaking every single task by ourselves. Simply knuckling down and getting the work done can sometimes seem easier than getting a team involved and sharing both the hard work and rewards, but it rarely is.

The negatives of both micromanaging others and trying to take on everything ourselves far outweigh any benefits of doing so. Wielding complete control over any project can be stressful. We worry about every task, lose sleep over the most trivial of details and become agitated and angry to the point where we snap at those around us. Even worse, trying to complete everything on our own can have a detrimental impact on our health and relationships as we work round the clock, skip meals and forgo time spent with loved ones to meet deadlines.

Eliminate a lot of that stress by delegating tasks to others and having complete faith that they’ll do a good job for you. It’s that faith which will ultimately ensure a successful project.

When you let go of the reins and let others know you trust them, they’re likely to feel empowered. Empowered people feel like a valuable member of a team and any number of surveys will tell you that employees who feel valued produce better work.

At work, it’s important to remember that your employees have been hired for their skills and expertise. Use them! Let people focus on what they’re good at and they’ll deliver better results than you could if you were simultaneously trying to juggle an infinite number of other tasks at the same time. Even if you’re only working on a personal project, put your ego aside and look around you; you’ll probably find people you know who can complete certain tasks better than you. Get in touch and ask for help!

What’s more, when you empower people to make decisions and deliver the goods on the smaller tasks, you free yourself up to concentrate on the proverbial bigger picture and isn’t that what we’d all really like to be doing?

Chris Skoyles holds various roles in journalism, marketing, digital media and events management. Throughout all these, his one constant obsession is using technology and creative ideas not simply to get things done, but to get them done well. Chris can be found on Twitter and he also blogs about his work, projects and passions at www.chrisskoyles.co.uk

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Staying Strong When It’s All Going Wrong

Photo credit: `?ccdoh1? (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Learned helplessness is the condition when we’re so used to being able to do nothing that we, in effect, give up trying to do anything – even though the circumstances might have changed so that we could do something if we tried.

It can be learned by animals when given electric shock and by babies who, for example, get no feedback from their mother: They learn that nothing they do gets any response. (Presumably human babies can also learn it from receiving unavoidable electric shocks, but to my knowledge this particular scientific experiment has never been published!)

As you can imagine, it can have massive implications for us as adults – if we believe nothing much we do can influence how things will turn out we’re fare less likely to try and do anything to improve our situation. We’re therefore much, much less able to be able to cope when things go wrong.

Things go wrong for everyone – the universe doesn’t have a grudge for anyone in particular. How we cope with the inevitable setbacks of everyday life is one of the things that differentiates between those people who are ultimately successful and those who aren’t.

This doesn’t mean, of course, that at the individual level some people aren’t unlucky and that others don’t get away almost without challenge by life – but in overall, big-picture terms our responses dictate a great deal of how life treats us.

It’s this approach which appears in such trite sayings as “If life throws you lemons, make lemonade”. They may be trite, but there’s an element of truth in them.

One of the big issues about learned helplessness is that we tend to regard the negative things in life as ‘permanent, pervasive and personal’. In other words, we tend to subconsciously believe that a bad situation will never change; that a bad situation in one part of our life is generalised to the rest of our lives; and that it’s something to do with us in some way that is our fault.

To challenge these assumptions, all you have to do is find a set of tools which encourage you (or force you) to look at things objectively, rather than dwelling on the negative. By getting a greater sense of perspective it puts the our setbacks in their place, cutting away at the effects of the Permanence, Pervasive and Personalisation agenda.

Two simple but massively useful questions to ask yourself when things get you down are these (there are others!):

It’s always easier to solve other people’s problems than your own, isn’t it? After all, the chances that you can give someone else good advice is greater than the chance of you accepting good advice that someone gives you!  Find ways of making the problem objective, so that it feels more like it belongs to someone else – getting distance from the setback is a very powerful tool.

Examples might include such things as writing the problem down in a letter to yourself (perhaps addressed to yourself at work if you’re at home or visa versa and perhaps using your middle name if you have one). Post it second class mail so that it takes a few days to arrive…

A seven? A five?  And having established that it’s not the end of the world, don’t dwell on how bad it is – instead ask yourself the killer question “What’s the one thing I can do, now, to move from a five to a four?”.  There’s always something – but as humans we tend to simply get over-whelmed by the big picture of how bad something is and dwell on the enormity of the issue, effectively saying to yourself “I can’t solve this, so I might as well not try”.

And you’re probably right – you can’t get from an eight to a one, probably, but there’s no reason to give up and stay at an eight. Seven is better than eight and there’s always something you can do.

Simon runs a soft skills training company called Aware Plus in the UK, but is probably best known for his work as a presentation skills trainer. He's also becoming known as a speaker on emotional robustness and personal resilience... he's also a fairly proficient fire-eater!

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Enhance Your Life: Going Beyond What’s Important to What’s Crucial

Climb past what's important to discover what's crucial in your life

When taking on the project of improving your productivity, you’ll undoubtedly come across two words that go hand-in-hand with the practice: important and urgent. These two words often intertwine depending on what your priorities are and how well you’re keeping up with what you’ve got on the go.

Knowing what the difference between important and urgent is a challenge for many, but once you’ve been doing it for a while it gets easier. It may not get easier to get the important stuff done before it turns into something urgent, but that’s a whole other matter. Another challenge is to remember that this is your time being spent, whether it is on a project or a task. How you plot out what each tasks means to you and to your time is worthy of strong consideration because if you simply jot things down without contemplating how they’ll be impacted by the time you have to offer and how they’ll impact the time you have to have available, you’ll end up in a state of overwhelm — and a very long to-do list.

Categorizing the levels of importance and urgency is another necessity. There’s no definitive way to organize these thoughts, but a common method is to use Stephen Covey’s Four Quadrant Matrix.

Stephen Covey's Four Quadrants

Covey’s matrix is still a resource for many who are trying to decide how and where to spend their time. But considering that it appeared in the book First Things First back in 1994, back when time management and productivity strategies didn’t have the benefit (or informational overflow) of the Internet, it could use a retooling. That may sound bold, but while the idea of Covey’s matrix still has some merit, the problem lies in the words used in the matrix itself.

The problem with important these days is that it is thrown around with little regard to what it means. In fact, it’s used so much that the word itself doesn’t seem to be as, well, important as it once was. Things that are important often are just things that have to get done, but have little resonance beyond that – they aren’t attached to anything deeper or more meaningful in the greater scheme of things. Anything with the word urgent attached to it will always feel stronger because of the need for it to be dealt with sooner rather than later. Even in passing, when someone says the word “urgent”, it creates a feeling or sense of immediacy. Unless someone is looking you straight in the eye, is genuinely in the moment and says the word “important” can it even come close to having the impact intended. The only way it gets closer is if you feel that what they are attaching to the word important to is actually important to you as well.

The word crucial, however, doesn’t get thrown around as much. Better still, when someone uses the word in the same manner as they used important as mentioned above, the ability to feel how much it matters to them all the more. When something is said to be crucial, it means that it is “of great importance” by definition alone. It’s possible that the other manner is which the word crucial is used – decisive or critical, especially in the success or failure of something: i.e. negotiations were at a crucial stage – adds instant power to the word it wouldn’t otherwise have, but the effects are still the same. When something is said to be crucial, you know it’s important. When something is said to be important, well…results may vary.

The key to really doing what matters on an overall scale – using David Allen’s Horizons of Focus as a measuring stick – you need to first earn to separate the urgent from the important and then curate what’s important to what’s crucial. Everything you do should lead to the great goal of what is crucial to you living a happy life. The amount of things that need to be done that are urgent should be minimal, because they generally serve to keep you occupied from what’s crucial to your overall goals in life. The amount of things that are important should be examined to separate what is important over the short term versus the long term. You may find that what you thought was important really isn’t at all. Often, these things are just things that will become urgent if you let them slide for too long, but they aren’t of any overarching importance. It’s those things that are crucial to you getting to where you want to be that will define your outcomes far great than anything else you do. You need to be clear on those so that you can map out how you’re going to achieve your goals – and your dreams.

Covey's matrix with a "Crucial Cube" inserted

Rather than use a quadrant to look at how to measure your actions and projects going forward, I suggest you do what I’ve done, and place a box in the dead center of the diagram. It’s what I call a Crucial Cube.

Sure, it isn’t exactly a cube (but Crucial Square doesn’t sound as appealing), but by adding it to the diagram the focus shifts to what’s crucial to you overall rather than what isn’t. Placing it in the centre draws focus, allows you to start there and finish on the outer realms or vice versa. The key is it gets you looking at what you really want to achieve and still displays the supporting things you can do to get there. The Crucial Cube feeds off of the remaining quadrants and the quadrants are fueled by what’s in the Crucial Cube.

Getting clear on what’s crucial is the most beneficial thing you can do to enhance your productivity, your balance and your life. Doing so could be the productivity wake-up call you need, the jumpstart to getting where you know you can be – and want to be. Moving beyond the word “important” and making a conscious choice to use the word “crucial” instead will power up your life in a simple, yet profound way.

Adopting a new habit is never easy, but with focus and perseverance, it can happen a lot faster. Take some time to really look at how you’re managing your time and your life, as well as what words you’re using in the process.

Understand urgency and how to deal with it.Investigate importance so that you can separate what is from what isn’t, bringing power back to the word by doing so.Cultivate what is crucial and you’ll enhance your life.

Give the diagram above a try. Write down what you feel is crucial to (and for) you inside a Crucial Cube. Then build the matrix around that, allowing the items inside to feed off the cube’s contents and vice versa. Let me know how it worked for you in the comments.

Mike Vardy is an independent writer, speaker, podcaster and "productivity pundit" who also dishes the goods at Vardy.me. You can follow him daily on Twitter, listen to him weekly on ProductiVardy, and read more from him eventually at Eventualism.

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Small Business Ideas for Going International

Congratulations – you’ve taken the plunge and launched your own small business in a difficult economy. Since you’re a Lifehack reader, it’s likely that your business has an online element – an ecommerce website, social media presence, etc. It’s also likely that your web presence is English language only, and you only receive patronage from English-speaking customers.

But why? Only 27% of all web users speak English – that means you’re missing out on nigh-on three-quarters of your potential online audience. In fact, no matter what sector you’re in, you’ll find it easier to rank on search engines in languages other than English, because there’s comparatively far less content and search engine competition.

It may seem daunting to think about exporting your products or services to countries where you don’t speak the native language, but in fact it’s a relatively easy process to test the waters in foreign markets with micro-sites – and thanks to tools like Google Translate and others that we’ll come to later, it’s also inexpensive. It’s a relatively simple five-step process to take your small business ideas out to the world.

1) Brainstorm markets

Your first step into international export is to use your knowledge of the global economy and world cultures to brainstorm countries where you think there may be a gap for your product. Let’s say you’re a designer of indie video games. You know that emerging markets like China and South Korea have rapidly growing economies, and you also know that culturally they’re very fond of technology and gaming – so it’s probably worth looking at launching a micro-site for those two countries!

2) Google Global Market Finder

This handy tool, Google’s  Global Market Finder, can help you test your theories. Brainstorm your list of English keywords (for instance, ‘videogames’) and select your region to test the traffic for its local equivalents. With the example above, it turns out that the markets with the highest search volumes for ‘videogames’, or the translated equivalent, are India, Japan and the Philippines – interesting…

3) Translate your micro-sites

Now you know which markets to target, your next step is to create your micro-sites (around five pages is average), get your content translated and localized (which means paying attention to local references, measurements, currencies, etc) and launch it – preferably on a local domain hosted in-country, or otherwise on a subdomain off your main site (you can always shift it to a local server later).

4) Optimize

But make sure before you launch that your website is optimized with your top keywords, which you will have decided upon by brainstorming, researching your local competitors, translating your English key terms and researching all of these using Google’s keyword tools.

5) Promote

Last, but not least, spread the word, by content marketing to relevant local websites (and building links), putting out press releases, and establishing your local social media presence (a foreign language Twitter account is a great way to quickly make a splash, but that’s a topic for another blog).

To turn your cottage industry into an international exporter, the steps are simple but the rewards are many – remember, on the internet no one knows your company is just one guy and a dog.

Christian Arno is the founder of professional translation agency Lingo24, and a regular industry pundit on the foreign language internet. Launched in 2001, Lingo24 now has over 150 employees spanning three continents and clients in over sixty countries, including the likes of MTV and World Bank. Follow Lingo24 on Twitter: @Lingo24.

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